Last month, February, the global mean surface temperature was a whopping 1.35 °C (2.43 °F) above the 1951-1980 mean. That smashes previous records, and is the hottest February on record by 0.47 °C. The previous hottest February's were in 1998 at 0.88 °C and 2015 at 0.87 °C.

It's also the highest ever anomaly for any month,with the previous highest anomaly being the previous month, January 2016, when the temperature was 1.14 °C above the 1951-1980 mean. There've now been five "hottest months on record" in a row, starting in October last year.

More than 2 degrees of warming

According to Professor Michael Mann's estimate, February brings us to the danger mark of 2 degrees hotter than pre-industrial temperatures.

Where is the heat happening? It's not the equatorial Pacific

It's more than El Niño that's causing the extra heat. Below is a map showing just where it's getting so hot. It's the northern hemisphere, including the Arctic, parts of the USA and Canada, and much of northern Europe:

Year to date comparisons

As I said, it's too soon to start the year-to-date charts, but I will anyway. Here is the chart to the end of 2015:

Figure 5 | Global mean surface temperature, progressive year to date to the end of 2015. Data source: GISS NASA

For this year, I'll have to extend the y axis a whole lot. Here's a taste. The lines represent the running average. The end point marked 2016 is the average of January and February anomalies this year:

Tedious Tisdale has diverged from reality

It’s very hard to overlook the fact that, over the past decade, climate models are simulating way too much warming and are diverging rapidly from reality.

Here is a chart of monthly anomalies (against the 1951-1980 mean) comparing observations with the multi-model mean from CMIP5 RCP8.5 (the worst pathway). It shows that Bob Tisdale is so used to spouting nonsense that he no longer knows how to tell the truth:

Not only that, but for the period from around 2005 onwards, the climate models overstate the forcings. They used estimates that meant that the models were overestimating what the warming would be. Below is a chart showing the models vs observations using actual forcings instead of estimated:

From the WUWT comments

It's surprising that Anthony Watts allowed an article showing how hot the world is getting, even one as full of nonsense as Bob Tisdale's. There aren't a lot of comments so far. Maybe deniers are stunned into silence. That would be a first!

All anyone else could come up with was no better than this dumb comment from conspiracy theorist Rud Istvan. ristvan wrote:

March 12, 2016 at 4:25 pm
Knowing something about statistics, there are only two plausible interpretations of your figures 1-5. 1.We are all going to die very soon of CAGW, worse than warmunists thought!!!. 2. Nino heat Burps get compensated. My money is on not panicking over an El Nino ‘burp’. Time will tell.
Thanks for the update, either way.:

Except the burp wasn't from the equatorial Pacific, it was from higher latitudes in the northern hemisphere. Some of that could have been hot air moving north - I'll wait to see what the experts say.

19 comments:

It's just NASA scientists panicking over the prospect of a Trump presidency and dialing their secret Arctic volcanic heating coils to 11. And the NOAA has probably turned its El Nino heat pump to High too.

Interesting. Only 28 "thoughts" so far. Seems that the post hasn't captured the attention of too many WUWT readers. Surprising, given that it's about the recent trend of temperatures - a topic that WUWT readers generally find worthy of a lot of discussion.

I wonder what might explain their relative lack of interest in Bob's recent post? I just can't imagine what the explanation might be.

As one might suspect, the land-based Northern Hemisphere GISTEMP anomaly for February is even greater: 2.36 °C. This means many temperate regions experienced February temperatures that were more characteristic of March throughout most of the 20th century.

Looks like the 'plateau' may be no more..of course it was bs from start. Nice proof of this would be a graph of the thirty year average over the last fifty years, as every year has been above the average, it'only going one way... straight to hell..lol

Taking 14C as the 'normal' global surface temperature for the 1951-1980 period, then an anomaly of +1.35C is an increase above 'normal' of about 10%.

Using human body temperature as an analogy (which may or may not be appropriate, but is interesting anyway); a 10% increase over 37C gives ~40.5C.

By at least one definition, a body temperature of >40C can be treated as hyperpyrexia, which "is considered a medical emergency as it may indicate a serious underlying condition or lead to significant side effects."

I haven't seen how the updated RSS compares to the most current UAH dataset, so I'm not sure how they now line up, but if the current UAH assessment is better than the new RSS, then I wonder if Curry thinks that the UAH is also better than the older RSS. If that's the case, then isn't she going against the "gold standard" that is RSS and actually supporting a dataset in UAH that shows more of a warming trend?

Percentages of temperatures is problematic, since the 0 point is essentially arbitrary. Really, you'd want to do the calculation in Kelvin for it to be meaningful. That would only show a 0.5% increase though, and that doesn't convey the urgency. The analogy to body temperature is a more effective argument.

Global mean temps rose from between 4-6 K from the LGM to Holocene Optimum, so a 1.35 K anomaly from the 1951-1980 mean represents between 23-34% of the difference between a deep ice age and the climate in which our civilization developed.

It's the magnitude of the Arctic anomaly as depicted in figure 3 that particularly concerns me. There's the range of immediate ecological consequences that such warming portends, but there's also the fact that that's where a lot of methane is locked up in permafrost...

I know that there are many climate scientists who discount the methane bomb notion, but if this anomalous warming of the Arctic becomes usual rather than an extraordinarily rare occurrence, we may already have left Kansas far behind.

For mine, I'm convinced that 1.5°C was left behind several years ago, and that we're probably already effectively too late to avoid 2°C short of imminent global nuclear war or pandemic. On the current escalating trend in atmospheric CO2 concentration, and given the almost total lack of response of the international community since COP21 in Paris and since Francis' encyclical, I can see no mechanism where we don't emit sufficient CO2 to scorch our civilisation from the planet.

Even without an unexpectedly huge slug of methane burping into the atmosphere it's likely that the known committments and feedings back are sufficient to put us closer to 3°C than 2°C. And no, the remarkable uptake of renewables doesn't assuage my concerns. See the above link and also here. Jevon's paradox seems to be operating under full steam, because for all the explosion in solar and wind it hasn't been sufficient to alter the escalating trajectory of CO2 emissions.

And Larry Marshall thinks that now is a great time to cut funding to the CSIRO's climate science division... The guy's playing chicken with a freight train, and he has on his bus a nation (and a planet) of passengers along for the ride.

To use a (related...) bushfire analogy, humanity is now at the watch and act level of alert. And yet we seem to be sitting in front of our collective televisions transfixed by inane pap and triviality.

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All you need to know about WUWT

WUWT insider Willis Eschenbach tells you all you need to know about Anthony Watts and his blog, WattsUpWithThat (WUWT). As part of his scathing commentary, Wondering Willis accuses Anthony Watts of being clueless about the blog articles he posts. To paraphrase:

Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece...(he couldn't tell if it would)... stand the harsh light of public exposure.

Definition of Denier (Oxford): A person who denies something, especially someone who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.
‘a prominent denier of global warming’
‘a climate change denier’

Alternative definition: A former French coin, equal to one twelfth of a Sou, which was withdrawn in the 19th century. Oxford. (The denier has since resurfaced with reduced value.)